FEATURES

Maybe you’ve clicked on their Web site. Or nodded at their billboards. Or spirited one of their urinal pucks into Paul Brown Stadium. But for any frustrated Bengals fans out there who haven’t heard of Andrew Simon and his Who Dey Revolution pranksters, help may finally be on the way.

By Keith O’Brien

Photo illustration by Michelle Nolan

Andrew Simon doesn’t seem like the revolutionary type. He’s baby-faced and a bit thick in the waist, prone to wearing monogrammed cufflinks and gold-tasseled dress shoes to business meetings—and he has a lot of those. At age 22, Simon briefly ran for Maine’s state legislature. At age 24, he started his own consulting business in Washington, D.C. He went to Indian Hill High School. He has met former President George W. Bush and shaken his hand. He is a proud Republican. But Simon, who’s 27 now, is angry. There are no outbursts. He does not pound his fist on the table. He is a professional, right down to his neatly parted dark brown hair. And that’s what makes him dangerous as the founder of Who Dey Revolution, an effort dedicated to making owner Mike Brown change his losing ways after 18 seasons of really pitiful football.

It started, like a lot of momentous things over the last decade, as a blog in February 2008. And mostly that’s what it remains: a collection of posts, written by a dozen guys, including Simon, about their beloved Bungles. But calling Who Dey Revolution (www.whodeyrevolution.com) a blog is like calling Jerry Springer a former mayor of Cincinnati. That’s simply not the half of it. The Who Dey Revolution has crossed over, leaving virtual reality for the streets last fall in a string of clever stunts that Simon, channeling Tyler Durden from the book Fight Club, dubbed Project Mayhem.

And so, there they were at Paul Brown Stadium last November, the Revolution minions, calling in Mike Brown to the Jerk Line—an in-house hotline used to report unacceptable behavior. And two weeks later, buying billboard space around town. “Dear Bengals,” the ad read in large, block letters. “Hire a General Manager. Love, Your Fans.” Soon, Simon’s men were calling on fans to boycott Bengals merchandise and concessions. “Bonus points are awarded for booing anyone in line to buy anything at the game,” Simon wrote on the site, under his pen name Brosef Stalin. And then, last December, came their biggest coup to date. Simon, organizing from Washington—where he was living and working as a political consultant at the time—ordered up 1,000 urinal cakes emblazoned with the Bengals record under Mike Brown at the time (98–186–1) and the tag line “Get Pissed!” Revolution lieutenants convinced fans to smuggle them into the stadium and plop them into urinals during a game against the Washington Redskins. And that did it: Who Dey Revolution had gone national, making headlines from coast to coast.

“All of us are lifelong Bengals fans who want nothing more than to be able to shut the Web site down,” Simon tells me one morning over coffee in a Hyde Park diner. “I would like nothing more than to not have to run a Bengals Web site pointing out where the Bengals are failing.”

But Simon doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. And so, with the 2009 season upon us, this unlikely band of revolutionaries—for the most part young lawyers, government consultants, and finance wonks from suburban Cincinnati—are now facing their greatest test: topping themselves. “You hear about so many internet phenomenons, or whatever we are, that explode and then fade away,” Simon says. “You hear about them, laugh, and then you never think or hear of them again. That’s why we want to make us self-perpetuating. We want to prove we’re here for the long term. That’s why this season is important. We want to show that we’re not going anywhere.”

Having already called for a boycott of Bengals season tickets, the Revolution has set about shoring up its own meager finances. Simon recently worked out a deal to sell ads on the site that will raise money for Project Mayhem tasks. He has arranged for game-day Revolution parties at a downtown bar this fall so that fellow travelers can still watch their team without giving a dime to Brown. And Simon promises more mayhem to come. Friends call him a bulldog, a hustler, a man who will not rest until the job is done. In short, Andrew Simon may be Mike Brown’s worst nightmare.

NO ONE COMPLAINED much when Mike Brown took control of the Bengals after his Hall of Fame father passed away in 1991. Publicly, anyway, he had the support of fellow owners, and Brown himself seemed confident, indicating the day after his father’s death that he saw no need to hire someone as assistant general manager—the job he’d held. “No one should want that job,” he said at the time. “It’s just a lot of headaches.”

Bengals executives, through a team spokesman, declined to comment for this story. But 18 years later the Bengals’ staff directory still has no general manager, much less an assistant, a rarity in a league that’s increasingly specialized. In that time the Bengals have posted the lowest winning percentage of any NFL team—worse than the Arizona Cardinals, the Detroit Lions and, yes, the Cleveland Browns. By 2008, Simon, the son of two attorneys in Symmes Township, decided he’d had enough. From Washington, he sent out an e-mail to friends: What if we started a blog about how Mike Brown is failing the team and, really, Cincinnati as a whole?

His friends embraced the idea with the fervor of insurgents, figuring that, like most blogs, Who Dey Revolution would flare up and then quietly slip into the blogosphere like a cold, distant star receding into the night sky. But this was an operation run by Andrew Simon: the kid who’d been voted “most opinionated” by his Indian Hill graduating class; the student who resurrected the Bates College Republicans on a liberal campus, growing a non-existent membership to over 100; the guy who’d landed jobs as a Bush campaign operative and an aide to Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “From the beginning,” says Mehlman, who hired Simon in 2005, “it was very clear that he was someone who was very smart, very creative, and very committed.”

A blog Simon could do. Designed with vintage communist propaganda art in mind, the Web site launched 18 months ago with a “Who Dey Revolution Manifesto.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” the post began. But instead of ranting, the Revolution rolled out “a plan of attack.” Namely: Publicly demand that the Bengals hire a general manager and expand the scouting department (the smallest in the league). These were hardly original ideas, but there was something about the packaging and the message, stated anew amid a particularly dreadful 4–11–1 Bengals season. Revolution T-shirts, sold on the site, began popping up around town. Two thousand online hits a day grew tenfold, Simon says. And what started as a blog between friends became a talk radio sensation when the Revolution raised $4,500 to post its billboards in just seven days. “I think that was the turning point, at least in my mind,” says Trey Berre, a Revolution writer, Cincinnati native, and now a Cook County prosecutor in Chicago. “The Web site went from a couple of guys venting about Mike Brown and the Bengals and turned into a site with substance.”

Rick Brunsman, owner of Empower Aviation in Hamilton, donated $3,000 alone. And by the Redskins game last December, when two of Simon’s friends left Hyde Park in a Land Rover packed with those urinal cakes, they all knew they were onto something. “It was crazy,” says Andrew Wiggers, a 27-year-old Indian Hill grad who ferried the product to the game. “Urinal cakes don’t smell very good. They’re there to make it so the urinals don’t smell bad, but it’s a strong scent when you have [that many] in one car.”

Wiggers made it, though. And once downtown, the cakes went fast. Fans slipped them into pockets and then, for the most part, did as they were asked, dropping them into urinals as the crowd roared outside.

Final score: Bengals 20, Redskins 13.

THIS SUMMER, THE Who Dey Revolution writers—who have never met in one place and don’t get paid for their work—began firing off e-mails about how to start the new season. The early plan: fly plane banners over Bengals training camp in Georgetown, Kentucky, and drop leaflets onto the field. The idea had all the hallmarks of a Cold War–era propaganda maneuver, but some of the guys weren’t so sure about the leaflet drop. They didn’t want to interfere with practice and potentially make the team worse. Plus, there was this concern: “The last thing we’d need as an [organization] is to have a dropped leaflet strike some kid in the eye,” one writer noted during the e-mail exchanges, “and we get sued for a scratched cornea.”

So much for the leaflets. But in mid-July, after much internal debate, they agreed to shell out $2,500 for four flights towing banners with the following messages:

    101–187–1 Hire a GM!…
         I can only see 1 scout from here!…
              $458,000,000 to build PBS = 0 playoff wins…
                   When is training camp for the front office?...

As Simon saw it, the banners fit the Revolution’s mayhem mission, which, he says, is to force change by disrupting “the natural order of Mike Brown’s Bengals.” “Everything we do,” he says, “has to do with changing the fundamental management structure of the team.” Naturally, some of the revolutionary ideas have been a little too zealous. “People want to have something where we could track where Mike Brown is, so we could pester him when he’s eating dinner,” Simon says. He won’t allow that. And Simon has also shot down suggestions that they protest in front of Brown’s house. “Can you imagine if some crazy psychopath got arrested for trespassing? Or worse? I’d have a lot of liability on my hands, if that happened.”

Still, Simon isn’t afraid of a little risk. He has told the other writers that he will accept full liability for any fallout, legal or otherwise, for Who Dey Revolution activities—a bold statement seeing as Simon mostly operates from afar (he headed off to get an MBA at Duke University in July). And while he’s put the kibosh on plenty of crazy ideas, he’s judiciously considered a few, too. Last year, Brunsman, a longtime Brown critic, passed along an idea that he hoped Who Dey Revolution might try: He wanted to use a high-powered laser to project messages onto the field during a game. “There are spots,” Brunsman swears, “places off the premises where you can project it onto the field.”

Intrigued, Simon made calls to laser companies. But there were problems at every turn. Do it on-site and you risked having the laser confiscated; do it off-site, Simon says, and “the intensity of the beam was going to have to be so high that it could harm somebody.” Ultimately, he had to pass. But the Revolution rolled on, knowing it had done everything it could to make one disgruntled Bengal fan’s dream a reality.

“Trust me,” Simon says, “I looked into every possible way.”

Originally published in the September 2009 issue.